The Bones of Grace. Tahmima Anam

finally explained to me that Zamzam was the son of one of the most influential tribal chiefs in the area, a man called Didag Baloch, who was said to be a possible successor to Bugti. The older man who had come was not Didag Baloch himself, but his brother, Abrar Baloch, Zamzam’s uncle. I spent the rest of the afternoon in my tent again, but thought about Zamzam differently after that, deciding we had something in common, the sense that we had been cast far from our provenance. What did Zamzam’s father make of him, an unferocious man more interested in bones than in the fate of his people? Did his father remind him that it was his duty to wrest his land from armies, governments, and copper prospectors, that this work was insignificant in comparison? I said none of this to Zamzam, but when we passed each other that evening, as roofs of light slanted over the savannah, I made sure to look him straight in the eyes as if to say, I know who you are, I know all about it, every last hammer of doubt.

      And then we found Diana’s tail. Or, rather, Zamzam did. A few weeks after the visit from his uncle, Zamzam came running to where Bart and I were chiselling. He’d found a fist-sized bone that looked promising. We abandoned what we were doing and started quarrying carefully, paring away the surrounding stone to a radius of about three feet. Another, slightly smaller bone was lodged a few inches away. We worked on, ignoring the afternoon sun as it roared above us, and, slowly, like fairytale crumbs, the outline of bones in ascending size began to emerge from the rock. We were on the fifth when the light faded and Bart called it a night. All day we had hardly spoken more than a few words to each other, but as soon as we set off back to camp we spoke at once. Had anyone noticed the notches on the third bone? And what was the size telling us, the distance between vertebrae? Once we reached the end of the spinal column, the pelvis wouldn’t be far away. Please let it be intact. Let it be perfect.

      Zamzam suggested we blast the area immediately but Bart said he wanted to take his time with the hand tools first. They went back and forth a few times, but Bart insisted, so we set ourselves upon the area, chiselling through the sequence from dawn till sunset every day. In the evenings we staked claims on a name. From the beginning I thought of her as female, and the others seemed to agree. It was Jimmy who suggested the name Diana, after the Roman goddess of the hunt. Crouching over her the next day, Zamzam whispered a prayer over the eight vertebrae of her exposed spinal column. ‘What’s he doing?’ Jimmy asked.

      ‘These are bones of grace,’ Zamzam said, lifting his grass-coloured eyes to meet mine.

      I woke the next morning to the sound of Bart’s voice. ‘I have to keep him here,’ he was saying. And another voice – Jimmy’s – saying, ‘You have to tell him,’ and Bart said he would, he just needed a few more days. ‘Let’s get to the pelvis,’ he said. They seemed to go back and forth a few more times, their voices quieting as they reached an agreement. ‘Fine,’ Jimmy said finally, ‘but it’s on you, Professor.’

      A journalist arrived with a cameraman, making us pose around Diana with our tools. Bart carefully brushed away a layer of dust and exposed Diana’s pelvis. The journalist cheered, and, in the tent that night, Jimmy and I drank cheap whisky while Zamzam sipped on a Pepsi, and we talked about the journal article we would co-author. I couldn’t sleep, dreaming of the weeks and months that would follow, chipping away the matrix, preparing the fossils, taking them back to Michigan and mounting them at the Museum. I couldn’t wait to tell you. My labours would soon be on display, like the Glass Flowers, and people would come and wonder at them and make up stories about my mythical creature. I felt my fate being determined, here in this dry, inhospitable land whose very dust was created long before history. The next afternoon, one of the drivers brought us the newspaper from Quetta, and on the front page was a photograph of Bart, the light in his eyes making him almost beautiful.

      We kept going. In my excitement I thought little about the conversation I’d overheard, and within a week or two it had faded from my mind. Things had a tinge of the hallucinogenic about them. Inch by inch, we pared away the rock that encased Diana. It was late October now, and the afternoons were cooler, so we worked through the day, stopping only when the light faded to grey. Our quarrying was almost finished, when, one evening, as Jimmy and I were cataloguing small bone fragments, Bart entered the tent, followed by a man in an army uniform.

      ‘I want a detail of your activities,’ the man said to Bart, looking around and drawing a circle with his finger that encompassed it all. He was wearing a cap and ironed trousers. Multicoloured lapels.

      ‘I told you,’ Bart said, ‘we’re just scientists. We look for fossils. We found one a few weeks ago.’

      ‘It was not in your daily report. We had to read about it in the paper.’

      Bart looked around him. ‘This isn’t the place to discuss it,’ he said.

      ‘We will decide what is the place.’

      The man went to Bart’s table and ran his hands through a pile of paperwork. A few sheets slid to the ground. I wondered if my story about Ambulocetus was among them.

      ‘General Alam no longer trusts you to give him what you promised.’

      ‘We are about to make history.’

      ‘You are no longer free to make your history here.’

      At that moment, Zamzam entered the tent. In his hand was a chisel. Bart looked at the officer, then at Jimmy and me, and then at Zamzam, who turned around and attempted to run. He made it two steps when the officer took hold of his arm and flung him to the ground as if he was no more than a small dog. Then he crouched down and held Zamzam by the throat. Zamzam gasped for breath, hacking unproductively at the officer’s foot with his chisel.

      It comforted me to recall the last woman I had met, an auntie who had sat beside me on the flight from Doha. She had asked whether I was married, and I had felt compelled to tell her I was engaged to a very nice man from back home. I tried to bring it to mind now, her hair-spray scent, the way she called me ‘darling’.

      ‘Do you know, Professor, the punishment for harbouring a terrorist?’ he said, his knee on Zamzam’s chest.

      ‘Please call my father,’ Zamzam whispered. The officer punched him, and Zamzam’s face swivelled sharply. I found myself moving towards him, taking a piece of cloth from my jacket (used, yesterday, to dust our half-discovered treasure), attempting to staunch the blood flowing from his mouth.

      The officer turned to me. ‘Please remove yourself, madam.’

      ‘He’s only a curator,’ I said.

      The officer tilted his head. ‘What else would he be?’

      ‘Leave it,’ Bart said, when Jimmy rose to his full height, dwarfing the rest of us. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

      ‘He hasn’t done anything,’ I repeated. I didn’t know why I was talking.

      Jimmy came towards us and I was afraid and hoping he would start a fight. He pulled me away as the second blow landed on Zamzam, aimed at the exact same place, a wound upon a wound, and that was when a drop of blood travelled onto my retreating hand. Jimmy carried me to my tent.

      ‘Don’t move,’ he said, pulling down the zip.

      I waited inside.

      I heard Zamzam being dragged out, his soft struggling, boots against the sand, a car door slamming shut. Within seconds they were gone. Jimmy unzipped my tent and pulled me out. I must have been crying, but I don’t remember exactly, just that everything became blurred. Bart was arguing with one of the soldiers, and the soldier was just standing there and staring down at him, and after a few minutes Bart followed him into a jeep, calling out to us to take care of Diana.

      Jimmy and I debated what to do. We could try and get her out of the ground. Zamzam had showed us how he was going to wire the site, where exactly he was going to place the dynamite. But even if we were able to control the blast, what would happen after? We had no way of shifting the bones, no hope of getting across a border with them. We had no other option but to cover the fossil over as best we could. For months after, this decision would continue to haunt me.

      Jimmy